Brian May on the two sides of Freddie Mercury’s creative genius: “Straight from the heart”
To a fan and to a friend, there was always something rather unknowable about the air with which Freddie Mercury carried himself.
He was, of course, searingly present in every sense of the word. You couldn’t walk into a room and somehow miss the man with the moustache, similarly to how you couldn’t turn on a record and overlook that powering vibrato. The whole point was that Mercury was entirely unmistakable, like most frontmen are, but with him, there was also something different.
His outside persona may have been one of complete pomp and flair, but behind the scenes lay the reality of someone who had had far from an easy time of it, and was almost forced to sing for his supper as if it was a matter of life and death. In this sense, while it would be too strong to point comparisons to Jekyll and Hyde, there was a morphing, chameleon-like ability to Mercury that no one could quite understand.
That extended even, as it turns out, to the people who spent their lives closest to him, like Brian May. The Queen guitarist was more likely than anyone to know Mercury like the back of his hand, but when comparing the ways he spoke about his songwriting spark, it was clear that two very different sides to the rock god emerged.
“To my mind, this is one of the most beautiful songs that Freddie ever wrote. It’s straight from the heart, and he opened up during the creation of it,” May said in relation to ‘It’s a Hard Life’. “It’s a very revealing thing about how relationships are, and he was talking about his relationship,” he added about the 1984 single, revealing a complex web around Mercury that had somewhat been unspun.
Yet if you contrasted that to the raucous heights of something like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, the tangle of the threads was simply impossible to unfurl. It might be a rock anthem, but the truth was that the song was the manifestation of Mercury standing teetering close to the edge of oblivion, and the effects of that, in his head, were only known to him.
“What is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ about? Well, I don’t think we’ll ever know, and if I knew, I probably wouldn’t want to tell you anyway,” May separately mused, before noting, “I think that Freddie was certainly battling with problems in his personal life, which he might have decided to put into the song himself. He was certainly looking at re-creating himself. But I don’t think at that point in time it was the best thing to do, so he actually decided to do it later. I think it’s best to leave it with a question mark in the air.”
Indeed, the notion of the “question mark in the air” is probably the best way of putting it, for rightly or wrongly, there were certain aspects of Mercury’s life that only he was privy to the details of, even if he couldn’t always understand the consequences of that. He carried so much on his shoulders, but the trick was to pass it off as if it were all the weight of a feather.
For better or worse, that was the mark of a man who was so set in his ways that he became all the more iconic for it, but it also leads one to wonder if there was a point where he wished he could turn back from the brink and strip all the regalia away. Possibly, and that was seen in snatches, but for the most part, he knew one thing: the show always had to go on.
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